Feherty's Rants and Raves

Tuesday, April 01, 2008

At this time of the year, we of the CBS golf crew don't have a lot of golf going on, so some of us take a break from the vacations that are our careers and go on what is supposed to be a real vacation. I forget about golf for a week and head for the beach in Grand Cayman with She Who Must Be Obeyed, and our five kids.

To avoid Miami International Airport, which is a refugee camp with runways, you have to jump on a charter tour jet. You've seen the travel brochures with the tanned and buff twentysomethings, strolling hand-in-hand along a deserted white strand, or giggling together over a tropical cocktail, forehead to forehead, while the moon shoots a strip of silver across the shimmering sea behind them. It's lovely.

At least, it might be if there wasn't a gaggle of little breadsnatchers waddling along behind. What you actually get is a cramped flying RV, filled with other people's snot-ridden whining brats, (and your own) followed by a few days spent smearing sungrease on everyone but yourself in approximately 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, over a beer that gets warm in about eight seconds.

Of course you never get to drink it, because you are too busy washing sand out of the wazoos of your assorted offspring over and over again all day long. Here I am trying to forget about work for a few days, and my youngest boy blunders into the condo, and takes off his swimsuit. Apparently, he has a pothole bunker up there somewhere, because about a ton of sand falls out of his backside and onto the carpet. I could drop a Strata and play an explosion shot into the master bedroom if I'd brought my clubs, though I doubt it could result in there being any more sand between the sheets. It's like trying to sleep in that scene from the movie, "From Here to Eternity," but without the water.

Since we've been here, She Who Must Be Obeyed has divided most of her time between loading the washing machine, shoveling sand out of the washing machine, and asking me to shave, "For once in my life," whatever that's supposed to mean. Oh, deep joy, I'm on vacation.

If it snowed in July, I'd be up a hill somewhere, showering to get warm, and whining like a 747. People who travel for a living can find something to complain about anywhere. Oh, oh, oh, another thing, while I'm on the subject of misleading advertising, which I'm not, I've been reading some of the magazines that people have left in the condo down here. I discovered a copy of, Men's Health, for a start. There is always a picture of some square-jawed hunk with knotted veins and a rippling six-pack on the cover, so naturally, I never, ever buy it.

"Drop those last 10 pounds!" it exclaims. Yeah, screw the first 20.

There was a survey in this edition that caught my eye. It described how to go about finding your perfect sex partner, so, since I am sharing a bed this week with my three-year-old daughter, who refuses to fall asleep unless she is holding She Who Must Be Obeyed's index finger in one hand, and mine in the other, making the exercise pointless, I decided to go for it. As I suspected, after 25 years on the road, the survey confirmed that my perfect sex partner is me.

I've become so desperate to spend a week away from what's normal, I even started to read Wine Spectator, which I think is the most perfectly named magazine on the planet, as most of the wine experts I know spend more time looking at the stuff than they do drinking it. Like all magazines, it is best read from back to front (ha ha) and I'd got about six pages into it when I came across a review of a wine that for some reason reminded me of McCord, and his golf swing.

Before I knew it, I'd been dragged back into the realm of golf once more. Fittingly, the reviewer's initials were B.S. It went something like this:

"It would be a good idea to take this bottle to someone else's house and leave it there. It has a vaguely amusing nose, but a leathery body, it's not very well rounded, and there is a distinct twang of elderly fruit on the finish. Probably should be put down, and left there."

Oh yeah, that's my buddy. There's no avoiding him either. We have cable down here, and he's playing with the wrinklies somewhere, I see his name on the bottom of the screen. Hubert Green is playing okay, and that reminds me of something. A couple of weeks ago, I saw that retrospective piece about the last time they played the US Open at Southern Hills, and the threat on Hubert's life.

It struck me as strange that nobody mentioned, in 1977 or whenever it was, Hubert Green was so thin, that most people would have missed him from point blank range. Hell, If he had put his hands up in surrender, he might have fallen through his own shorts and into his Sansabelts.